Dvein - The Vein 'Magma'

'Magma' is the very first music video to come from Dvein production studio in Barcelona, made for The Vein's new single. It also won the Gold Music Video Award at the 2013 Australian Effects & Animation Festival. The team explained that the client, Adobe, supplied no brief except for the requirement that they were to build the finished video using creative software as part of the process and, of course, design and add the logo in the end. Because they were free to do whatever they wanted, they had complete involvement from the beginning to the end of the project including direction and art direction, post production and visual effects.

“The main inspiration for this project was the art of the German painter Kaspar David Friederich, as well as images of Icelandic landscapes. We recorded the live action with a RED ONE Mysterium camera. The format was 4K at 60 fps. The final result is a composition of live action and CG, using some of the filmed footage and rebuilding some parts of the project with CG.

“Our team was very small, so everybody worked together to get the best result. In fact, everything was done inside our studio in Barcelona. Dvein’s directors Fernando Domínguez, Teo Guillem and Carlos Pardo provided direction and art direction for the live action and animation. They also worked on the live action photography and built the CG animation, with the help of a ZBrush artist, Luis Gomez Guzman.”

Animatics were created to form specific ideas about what they needed to shoot and how. They also needed to consider some important factors such as selecting the cast. “We were looking for people with characteristic and aged faces with wrinkles, so their images could fit perfectly into the rocky, mountainous landscape that we wanted to create. Make-up was an important thing to consider as well. We used white clay to confer an eroded texture to the old men’s faces. We also predefined the camera movements in order to know how the final movement would work once we fit it with the animation.

“Directing the actors was pretty easy - they just had to stand still and open their mouths according to the rhythm. As to the lens, we needed to keep everything in focus all the time, in order to achieve the best integration with the CG images, but this was a challenge because we were using a macro lens, so that the size of the subject on the image sensor was life size or greater.

“We wanted to confer this frozen mountain look to the actor’s faces, so we spent some time testing the best way to do it. Finally, we used white, unidirectional light, that could define the faces shapes and volume. In the first part of the video, we used the live action footage to flow over the mountain surfaces and in the second part, the one with volcano images, we used CG images.

“We shot the images of the paint by setting up the camera in bird’s eye position, and dropping the liquids onto a flat, white surface. It was funny because the paint movements were unpredictable and random shapes were appearing on the surface depending on the density and quantity of the liquid dropped. We played with many colours, mixtures and different densities to get the final results.”

The main references used as inspiration for the landscapes were aerial pictures of Iceland, with rivers drawing winding shapes on the snowy and rocky landscape, with some images of volcanoes and lava torrents as well. The essential tools were Cinema 4D, used to generate landscapes, and RealFlow to build the second part of the video, in which the groups of fluid faces emerge. ZBrush was used to texturize the faces and the rocky effects, and also to merge the faces and mountains into landscapes. www.dvein.com

The 2014 Australian Effects & Animation Festival is now underway. To enter your team's projects, see the Entry Form here.